Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THE NATIONAL IMMIGRATION AGENCY has announced that it has dismantled a labor ring led by a Taiwanese man, surnamed Hung, and his Indonesian wife, surnamed Hou.
The labor ring reportedly arranged employment for migrant workers who had absconded from their jobs, sometimes referred to as “runaway” migrant workers or “undocumented” migrant workers. While “runaway” migrant worker is seen as a discriminatory term, “undocumented” is an inaccurate term, in that Taiwan is an island–meaning that most migrant workers arrive in Taiwan by plane. This makes it very difficult for any migrant worker to truly enter Taiwan without being documented.
At the same time, the number of absconded migrant workers in Taiwan is clearly increasing. The number of absconded migrant workers is thought to be over 90,000. The overall number of migrant workers is more than 810,000.
Hung and Hou attracted the scrutiny of the NIA due to the fact that they recruited migrant workers for jobs such as cleaning, hauling, and breaking stones on quarries. This is not unlike the jobs that migrant workers already do in Taiwan, in that migrant workers are employed taking care of the elderly, as fishermen on the high seas, in factories, or in agricultural and forestry.
Specifically, Hung and Hou took a daily commission of 500 NT to 1,100 NT each day from migrant workers. Over four months, this is thought to have generated two million NT.
One notes that Hung and Hou were more or less taking on the same role currently played by brokers in Taiwan’s migrant work system. Brokers arrange for the employment of migrant workers in Taiwan, as well as their transportation to and from Taiwan. However, migrant workers have to take out exorbitant loans in order to pay brokers, who may provide the loans themselves. This leaves migrant workers in severe debt to brokers, who may also take some of the money paid to migrant workers, and raising questions about whether their families at home are receiving the money. Consequently, the conditions facing migrant workers have sometimes been termed forced labor.
Migrant worker groups, as well as regional governments including the Indonesian government, have called for an end to the broker system. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese government has been reluctant to phase out the broker system, to instead institute a system of government-to-government hiring, claiming that brokers fulfill a market need.
The Taiwanese government has historically been reluctant to allow migrant workers to change work categories except under the most extreme of circumstances, such as sexual assault by an employer. Otherwise, the Taiwanese government has sought to regulate and control the channels through which migrant workers can change employment. Sometimes this is with the view that migrant caregivers wish to change to higher-paid factory jobs, though regardless, migrant workers are still taking on the “3D”—”dirty, dangerous, and demeaning”—jobs that Taiwanese workers do not want to do.
To this extent, some industries in Taiwan, such as the agricultural industry, have already become dependent on a floating population of absconded migrant workers. The agriculture industry requires 100,000 temporary workers per season, but with hiring quotas recently raised to 12,000, demand still far outstrips supply.
It proves ironic, then, to see the National Immigration Agency targeting individuals for acting as brokers for absconded migrant workers, when their activity is not so different from regular brokers, and the Taiwanese government, in the meantime, refuses to get rid of the broker system. Moreover, if the number of absconded migrant workers is on the rise and some industries are already heavily reliant on them, this, too, is a “market need”. Yet the Taiwanese government refuses to take steps to allow migrant workers to transfer employment or obtain employment easily if they leave their original jobs, which has given rise to illegal migrant brokers such as Hung and Hou.